Love Is About The Small Things
by postscriptress
Summary: There are a million other ways their story could have gone. This is but one of them. (This is the universe where Masayuki is the one Chiyo sees first.)


This time – though they hadn't known that there was supposed to be some other way this story goes, as per usual of a world where things went differently – when she's late for her entrance ceremony and running for her life, out of breath and eyes brimming with tears, the first person she sees there is not Umetarou Nozaki, who'd succumbed to the majesty of his migraine and just skipped out. But she sees someone else. Masayuki Hori.

He wasn't even supposed to be here. But the drama club president had casually let something drop about scouting for new talent, and – well, Masayuki is totally onboard with that idea.

Their current president, just like all the other presidents before him, is their greatest hero, their go-to protagonist – but he's graduating soon, and they need someone to fill his shoes. Well, most of his shoes. He'd already ceded most of the administrative details to Masayuki a few months ago, making him vice-president. He would've ceded the protagonist status to Masayuki as well, seeing as the incoming second-year was pretty much the best damned actor they'd had, but. Well. Height problems.

But enough about that. Right now, what really matters is that he's here, trying so hard not to look out of place with how he's got a sash 'round his waist, flyers in his hands, outside the gate, and she's there, right there, in front of him, blubbering even as she keeps on running.

"Excuse me, miss?"

She startles at the sound of his voice, and some faraway part of him is reminded of a fidgety cat, for some reason, which is weird. It's weird because the girl in front of him, bright hair and wide eyes and her hair tied back with a ribbon, doesn't look much like a cat at all. Well. Except for the bright hair.

Another thing in favor of her being a fidgety cat, though – she still doesn't say a word.

"Miss," Masayuki goes on, his voice dipping into the lower levels he used when he was younger and had to calm his little brother down from his temper tantrums. "You looked like you were in a hurry. Were you running late?"

Masayuki knows that he is stating the obvious right about now, he knows it. The girl's uniform is a dead giveaway with its starch-stiff obvious newness, so _first-year_, but where her ribbon should be green she's using third-year blue. Like him, then, with his out-of-place blue uniform shirt.

"U-um. Yeah." The girl murmurs, her cheeks flushed pink with exertion and probably the cold, her eyes averted with what Masayuki assumes to be sheer embarrassment. He can't help but think it's a little bit cute. Scratch that, _everything_ about this girl is a little bit cute. "I got on the wrong train, and I missed a lot of stops, and before I knew it I was late and didn't know where I was going."

"Huh, that sounds _terrible_," Masayuki says, commiserating, knowing that doing so would, at the very least, stop her tears from flowing that much. To be completely honest, Masayuki has no idea what he's supposed to do when people cry. That he hasn't freaked out in the face of this girl's blubbering tears so far is kind of a feat for him. "If you don't mind me asking, where do you live? I might be able to draw up a new set of instructions for you."

She tells him.

Masayuki can't help himself – he _laughs_.

"What's the matter," the girl deadpans, fixing him with a glare that should probably be scary but comes off looking...well, _still_ cute.

"Nothing, it's just that it's awfully close to where I live, and in fact I know the exact route you should take to get here quicker." Masayuki says. "But first things first. Aren't we supposed to get you somewhere?"

"O-oh, right! They're probably halfway through with it by now," the girl admits, defeated. "I'm late. _Really_ late. On the first day, no less, I'm _horrible_. And now I can't even get inside..."

"_Nonsense_," Masayuki says, frowning. "Sure, the front gate's locked, but there are other ways of getting in. Here, come with me, I'll take you there."

She falls into step with him then, and keeps stealing glances every few minutes. Still fidgety. Well, he wouldn't blame her, what with the whole getting-lost angle and all. It's a good thing he'd always been particularly adept at finding his way, or he'd been in the same state as she was when he first got here.

The Academy's fault. Why the hell did this local school have to have so much winding hallways? It boggles the mind.

"Um, thank you, by the way," the girl tells him, still peeking glances at him out of the corner of her eye. "Sorry for troubling you."

"It's no trouble at all," Masayuki says, breezily, tucking some loose flyers into the pile he held to his chest. "I wasn't particularly supposed to be anywhere. Well. At least not before your assembly ended. I'm supposed to be scouting."

"Scouting? You're part of a club?"

"Drama, yes," Masayuki affirms, adjusting his sash. "I wasn't actually even supposed to be here – classes don't start until tomorrow – but well, a duty's a duty."

The girl favors him with a soft little smile that probably wouldn't look out of place in a great epic tale about a beautiful little princess. "That's really responsible of you."

"Thanks...oh, here we are." Masayuki stops in his tracks, sets down his pile of flyers, and steps back. Considers. The front gate was locked, and he knows that all the other usual gates were locked too, at least before the end of the welcoming ceremony. There's another way in, which is pretty much why Masayuki had felt secure even though the printers had churned out flyers at a much slower rate than they usually had, because he had meant to use this way. Only thing is, it's a way he had best gone through alone. It's...not exactly an easy way in.

Masayuki opens his mouth to speak, only to realize that he doesn't know this girl's name and doesn't know how to start that sentence. So he tries again. "Come here."

"Huh?" She asks, cocking her head, but complying with his request nonetheless, stepping closer to him, and then –

– _then_ –

– then he's got his hands on her waist, as if he were leading her in some kind of dance, and, in a move perfected by years and years of playing an exultant prince, he lifts her up.

If he were to look closely he would've seen that the girl's cheeks were redder than anything, redder than the red tie Masayuki has around his collar and the red ribbons she'd eventually end up wearing in her hair, and that her wide purple eyes absolutely shone when they looked at him, but he wasn't looking closely. He was focusing on setting her down on the fence just right, just beside the sturdy branch that he knows would help them in. He just knows it. Not that he runs late regularly, mind – this is _Masayuki Hori_ we're talking about, only the most ridiculously punctual second-year in the history of forever – but, well. It's always best to be prepared.

"There we go." He says, coolly, as he sets her down, gently as can be, atop the brick wall. "Now, there's a branch behind you. Can you get there?"

The girl nods, her cheeks still pink, adjusting the straps of her backpack. As she moves to follow his instruction, he takes the flyers from where he'd left them, and promptly goes to clamber up the wall, himself.

Just his luck that he'd been rather good at the monkey bars when he was a child.

So there he goes, and when he gets to the bench the girl's still there, taking deep heaving breaths, and it worries him. "Huh. You all right there?"

It's not really far away from the ground, which is why he chose this tree and not the other one, but she shakes her head anyway, which is kind of understandable, he thinks. No matter how high or how low it is, this still entails going down a tree.

"I'll go first, then," Masayuki says, tossing the bag of flyers first before going down one branch, then the other, then jumping. Well, that was a bit higher than he'd expected. If he were in an introspective mood he could've probably fashioned an entire existential crisis over how much this tree had grown since he last saw it, but that would've been tedious. So instead he looks up at her, and says, "Your turn."

She's still a bit fidgety when she goes down, but for the most part Masayuki coaches her into calmly going down the entire way, save for when her shoe snags on a branch and she just. Just can't help but go down, her hair and ribbon whipping behind her like flying flags, and it's all he can do for his heart not to overheat from the rapid beating, and _oh_ –

He catches her.

If a certain Umetarou Nozaki had seen this, _this_, this right here, would've been the part he commits to memory and immortalizes in the next chapter of _Let's Fall In Love_. But this time, he _isn't_ here, which is kind of the whole point.

Her cheeks are still pink when he leads her down to her feet, to the school gymnasium. Even when they walk through the blooming cherry trees side-by-side, petals fluttering in the breeze, spring in full flower. It's a beautiful sight. Petals are falling down above them, some of them catching on her bangs and tousled hair.

"Come to think of it," he muses, favoring her with a curious eye, "You never did tell me your name."

"...it's Sakura," the girl says, her cheeks still deliciously warm. "Chiyo Sakura."

How fitting, especially considering the part where, with her pink cheeks, she's a good fit amongst all these blooming cherry blossoms, herself. But this is _Hori_, not _Mikoshiba_, so he doesn't say _that_. Instead, he smiles softly, reaches out to pluck a stray blossom from her hair, and says,

"Welcome to Roman Academy, Sakura-san."

* * *

Later that night, he's so lost in the sheer unadulterated _triumph_ about the new hero he'd scouted during the assembly (the hero's name was _Kashima_, hell, even the name sounded majestic) that everything else just comes to him as an indistinct, faintly happy blur.

Then he gets the call from Nozaki.

Nozaki, his little brother's _senpai_ from his basketball club, who'd moved to Roman Academy for high school. The one who Masayuki sometimes asks play scripts from, in exchange of Masayuki helping him with his _manga_ – heck, who knew the guy was one hell of a fairytale romance writer? Who also drew _shoujo_ _manga_? It boggles the mind. But that's neither here nor there.

What's happening here is that Nozaki's calling him right now, his voice strained with what seems to be the tail end of a massive migraine. It's about the heroine he's supposed to be making character designs for in his new series – a more intricate, long-running thing, the thing he's asking for Masayuki's help with the backgrounds for. "I've almost got her, but...I don't know. It just feels wrong...There's something missing, I think."

"Hm. Let's see if I can help ya. What does she look like?"

"I'll send you a picture. Wait a sec."

He disconnects, and soon enough he gets the picture Nozaki sent, a girl – bangs and long, wavy hair framing her smiling face, a sailor uniform. Nozaki's right. There _does_ seem to be something missing.

But _what_?

"Why don't you try hair accessories? Girls in _manga_ have those a lot, don't they?" Masayuki says, offhandedly, when Nozaki calls again. He doesn't know exactly where this idea is coming from, but... "Like, say, a ribbon. White. Tying her hair back – would that help?"

Then Masayuki hears some scratchy sounds from the other side of the line – probably Nozaki's pencil going across paper – and, in quick succession: a sigh, a quick inhalation of breath, and then –

"She looks perfect, Hori-_senpai_!" Nozaki just _gushes_, in a tone Masayuki'd never thought he'd hear on him, ever. Oh well. Life is full of surprises, and all that. "Thanks a lot!"

Masayuki chuckles softly. "It's nothing, Nozaki. Show me how she looks like when you're done, 'k?"

When Nozaki sends him the picture later that night, Masayuki's heart skips a beat and he thinks – he _thinks_, but he isn't quite _sure_ – that he's missing something really important.

* * *

Months pass. Chiyo still can't look out on the cherry blossom trees without her cheeks going warm and her heart going crazy.

So she does the thing a girl in her situation would normally do – she tells her best friend.

Well, the only thing not normal about this situation is that her best friend is _Yuzuki Seo_, blunt and tactless and for whom the word 'delicacy' does not seem to exist.

Yuzuki, who, in the face of Chiyo's red cheeks and fluster, just sits up, fixes her with a capital-L _Look_, and tells her something.

It's a thing that Yuzuki _always _gets to have the satisfaction of telling her, in any and all universes. A thing that she keeps telling her, back when she first told her – even now, few months shy of a full year after, over lunch.

"You can just _tell_ him, you know," she deadpans, flicking her hair out of her face. "It's _obvious_ you've got the hots for him."

"It's not that _easy_, Yuzuki." Chiyo groans, her face in her hands. They're in the school grounds. Somewhere in the distance, she sees a flash of blue from one of the windows up above – it's probably _not_ him, not his ever-present shirt, but still. _Still_. It could be. She flushes deeper. "He doesn't even _know_ me."

"Then you tell him who you are. It's not really that hard." Yuzuki says, casually checking for dirt under her fingernails. "You _gotta_ get a move on, Chiyo. Y'know Kashima gave him chocolate this Valentines' Day, right?"

Chiyo cocks her head innocently. "Who's Kashima?"

"What – you _seriously_ don't know?"

"Um, no...?"

"Ugh, you're so stuck on that '_Hori-senpai'_ of yours that you can't even see anyone else, I _get it_ now." Yuzuki sighs, pressing a palm to her forehead.

This should normally be something she'd laugh off and make some kind of harmless quip about (or at least she'd _think_ it was a harmless quip), but this is _Chiyo_, her high school best friend, who is normally more...well, _sane_, than this gushing mess the drama club pres' turns her into.

One time Yuzuki even caught Chiyo hanging outside the third-years' classrooms to swipe an eraser the upperclassman forgot. An _eraser._

Heaven help her.

"Anyway. Chiyo. Please. Tell him. Or I'll force you into playing basketball with me next week."

It's the scariest threat Yuzuki could ever make.

"A-alright, okay. Geez."

* * *

In the end, before Chiyo Sakura gets to tell Masayuki Hori what she feels for him – well. They actually meet. For real.

First, some context. Umetarou Nozaki is this tall guy who once asked for Chiyo's help after seeing her work in art club. Apparently he's some marginally popular _shoujo manga-ka_ who needs assistants, so sure, why not? That's where she gets stuck into the world of Mamiko (who wears a single ribbon in her hair, like she used to), and her pure, incorruptible love for her 'Suzuki-kun'. She's not Chiyo's role model, but...hell. She _is_ Chiyo's role model, okay. And Suzuki-kun keeps reminding her of how much of a freaking gentleman Hori had been to her. It just fit.

Working on the _manga_ is also how she gets to meet Nozaki's other assistant, Mikoto Mikoshiba, cool and effortlessly charming except for the times when he flushes beet red and regrets speaking, which is pretty much 95% of the time. He'd apparently been Nozaki's primary source for Mamiko's personality stats, which Chiyo keeps noting with a great level of interest. They've become friends, and he doesn't even mind that she still keeps calling him 'Mikorin'.

Anyway. This day comes hot on the heels of her suggesting Yuzuki to Nozaki as a potential new heroine – what, her voice is a few decibels short of angelic, okay? – and Mikorin grins and introduces them to his best friend, Yuu Kashima, the school prince.

Chiyo thinks that the name '_Kashima_' is vaguely familiar to her – like something someone told her before – but she doesn't know where she's heard of it, however.

(Somewhere across the school, Yuzuki sneezes a particularly _magnificent_ sneeze.)

"Tsch," Kashima says, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows furrowing. "It's almost time."

"Yeah, he's coming to pick you up, again." Mikorin sighs, looking at Kashima worriedly. "I'm kind of surprised you're still alive at this rate, what with all the times you keep pulling this on him."

"Hm? What are you talking about, Mikorin?"

"See, Sakura, this brat over here is _always_ really freaking late." Mikorin says, jerking a finger at his innocently grinning friend, as if _he_ weren't the type to sleep past his alarms, himself. "So someone always has to come and pick her up."

"Oh? Really? That sounds so cool!" Like a fairytale prince with his carriage! Chiyo never knew the drama club was that particular about details. (Okay, Chiyo never really knew much about the drama club save for the part that it's where Hori-_senpai_ is, and he's magnificent.)

"Yeah...you'll probably find yourself taking that back." Mikorin says, stepping a few steps back, pulling her with him, barely pushing her out of the way of what could be veritably called a _hurricane_.

"_Kashima, I swear to god, this time I'm gonna __**kill**__ you!_"

Okay, so that was just Masayuki Hori.

That was _Masayuki Hori_.

So now Chiyo's cheeks are red as Mikorin's hair, and freaking _Masayuki Hori_ turns to them with cool, careless recognition in his golden-brown eyes as he carts Kashima away. "Hello there."

There are no words.

* * *

There is an even greater lack of words for the feelings that Chiyo gets stuck dealing with when she finds out that the unknown third assistant of their little group is actually Hori-_senpai_ _himself_. It was a bit awkward, with how she'd basically confronted him on his little brief-and-kitten doodles (and had inadvertently made Kashima drop an entire can of blue paint, for some reason), but well. It was worth it.

It was _especially_ worth it, especially right _now_, when he's written something in his beta markings and it's for _her_.

_Thanks for the help yesterday. It was nice to meet you!_ And, below that, another one of his cute little kitten doodles. It's superimposed on an empty sky, cherry trees and school building painstakingly rendered below, and it reminds Chiyo of the day they first met.

In any other world, any other time where he wasn't the one she fell for, this would have still happened, but she would have reacted to it differently. With relief, maybe, or even excitement – but not the giddy, heart-throbbing, overwhelmingly unapologetic excitement she's feeling right now. But this isn't any other world, this is right here right now, so this is what she writes:

_It was nice to meet you again, Hori-senpai! Please take care of me_.

And, because this is the world where Chiyo makes up her mind to let her feelings known –

She ends that sentence with a heart.

.

.

**Original AO3 Link: /works/2716091**


End file.
